


the ice is getting thinner

by jaekyu



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arranged Marriage, F/M, Gendry is a Baratheon, Minor Character Death, Miscarriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-09-01 20:28:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16772332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaekyu/pseuds/jaekyu
Summary: In a Westeros that looks a lot like the one you know but not quite: Sansa Stark weds Gendry Baratheon of Dragonstone.





	the ice is getting thinner

**Author's Note:**

> THIS FIC, LET'S TALK: i reworked this top to bottom. TWICE! and it. is. huge. and i don't know how it got that way. originally i had an entire subplot in this thing too that i cut out. and after i cut it out the fic? somehow? got? longer? maybe i just love sansa/gendry and i did not want to stop writing about them. i mainly tried to stick to the show canon (when i tried to stick to canon at all lmao) but some book shit might have slipped in there. i also might say some shit that is totally not canon at all too! who knows! 
> 
> BUT, ANYWAY, BASICALLY, in this au gendry is the legitimate son of stannis baratheon and his wife, so he's a real life lord and he's gonna rule dragonstone one day. that's about all the info you need going into this thing. oh and, the show aged them up so i can age them up too. 
> 
> i tagged for this but i'll mention it again here just in case: this fic heavily features a fear or infertility for the first half of it and mentions (and eventually features) miscarriages. i don't go into anything graphic but is a heavy theme of this fic.
> 
> godspeed. enjoy this fucking monster.
> 
> special shoutout to anna ♡ who told me even if no one else read this they would.

> _we're not the same, dear, as we used to be_  
>  _the seasons have changed and so have we_  
>  _there was little we could say, and even less we could do_  
>  _to stop the ice from getting thinner under me and you_

(DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE)

**A PREFACE:**

  
There will be a day, years from the close of this story, where Sansa will turn her head to look behind her. Look behind her and see the road she has followed for many years and she will think that — perhaps in some way — she knew she would marry Gendry Baratheon before anyone ever told her.

There had been a great many people who thought Sansa Stark naive. And maybe there were some ways that she was. But she was young still, in this part of this story, and, though filled with the wonders of any girl who had grown up in peace would be, Sansa Stark was not stupid. If there was one thing Sansa understood completely it was marriage and what it meant to her as a highborn Lady.

When Sansa is a girl of fifteen, a woman by almost every standard, her Father cups both hands of her hands inside just one of his own, gentle with her like her bones are the hollow ones of birds. He will say to her, “you know of Gendry Baratheon,” and Sansa will nod. Then Ned will say, “Stannis Baratheon’s boy. Sansa, Stannis has asked for my permission for you to marry his son.”

And years and years passed the close of this story, Sansa will decide she must have known this already, somehow. Because when her father will tell her this, she will not be surprised.

**I.**

  
The only stories Sansa ever wanted to hear were about princesses. The stories almost always had princes, too, of course, and Sansa would imagine them golden-haired and green-eyed and beautiful. And it did not matter to her how many times she was told the same story, she would always wish to hear it again.

“Will I be a princess one day?” Sansa asks a handmaiden one day, twisting thread through her embroidery hoop with learned precision.

“You may be,” the handmaiden smiles at her. “Perhaps one day you’ll marry the Prince and when he becomes King, you’ll be his Queen. And all of your babies will be princes and princesses.”

Sansa’s heart had filled at the idea; everything seemed so bright in those moments.

Sansa will not marry Prince Joffrey. She thought she might, she had let herself dream of days from a future not yet set in stone. She thought her Father and Robert Baratheon were good friends, old friends from so long ago, and they must have some desire to unite their houses.

But Cersei Lannister had wanted her son to marry Margaery of House Tyrell, who were rich in gold and land and poise, and Robert Baratheon allowed something his wife wished of him for once. And so the duty fell on Robb to marry Princess Myrcella — and House Baratheon of King’s Landing and House Stark of Winterfell will unite all the same.

Sansa is worried, for but a moment, that she has been forgotten. That she will be wed to some low, sad, fat Lord from a House no one will remember a thousand years from now, and she’ll be lonely and miserable and will lament having to give him children.

And then, Stannis Baratheon arrives from Dragonstone.

**II.**

Sansa is ten the first time she meets Stannis Baratheon.

He brings his wife with him to Winterfell. Lady Selyse, a long and lean woman woman who looks as if she may snap in half at any moment. They bring their daughter, Shireen, who is Arya’s age. Shireen is small and sickly looking compared to Sansa’s sister, but she smiles often.

There is a son as well. The only son Lady Selyse managed to nurture into maturity, birthed when she was a much younger woman. The son is two years older than Sansa, nearly the same age as Robb. His name is Gendry.

He rides into Winterfell upon a dark-coloured horse and Jeyne Poole tugs at Sansa’s sleeve, “he’s handsome, isn’t he?” She giggles.

Sansa watches the way Gendry moves. Even at two and ten it is obvious he will grow to be all bulk and brutish strength. He young age only means, for now, he carries it awkwardly. The growing muscles in his chest and arms push against the confines of his clothes when he moves.

Robb is strong. Robb is built-well. Everyone says so. But Robb is not built like Gendry. There is a grace and a quietness to Robb’s strength that Gendry lacks. Next to each other they look nothing alike.

Sansa observes the mud spread across Gendry’s pants and boots from riding. She looks down at her own hands; white and clean as if polished porcelain.

Gendry Baratheon is not a prince. He never will be. But he is a Lord. He will be the Lord of Dragonstone when his father gives the seat to him. After Gendry, his children will be given Dragonstone. Their will be a first born son, who will never be a prince either, but will be the heir to a castle all the same.

Before there is a son, though, there must be a wife. A wife who can birth sons.

He is handsome, Sansa thinks to herself. She does not say it out loud.

Sansa is not sure how to speak to Gendry.

It comes easily to Arya. She shares a temperament and a great many interests with Gendry, and she has hardly ever been shy.

There is a duty Sansa feels even at this age: the weight of the eldest daughter and what it means and the type of people who will watch her every move and why they will watch her to begin with. Arya lacks it, whether because she is the second daughter or because of her age, Sansa does not know.

“What is he hates me?” Sansa asks her mother the night after Stannis arrives. “Gendry, what is he thinks I’m boring and stupid and ugly?”

Her mother stills the brush she had been passing through Sansa’s hair. “Sweetling,” she coos at her daughter, “he is a foolish boy if he doesn’t find you charming and smart and beautiful.”

The words hardly make Sansa feel any better.

**III.**

Stannis Baratheon returns to Winterfell with his family when Sansa is fourteen.

Gendry is six and ten and has filled out so much in such a short amount of time. The difference between him and Robb is nearly startling. Gendry looks as if a boy born to low status, forced to work too young and hardened in body and face as a result. But he is not that; he is highborn, he is a blood relative to the King of the entire Real. And still, he is broad and bulky and bull-like.

Girls notice him more now too.

Sansa catches the eyes of women on Gendry over and over during this visit. She watches a dinner maid pour the single cup of ale Stannis allows Gendry at supper and then as the maid watches the way Gendry’s fingers curl around his cup to grasp it. Sansa watches the daughter of the man who cares for the horses watches the way Gendry’s shirt rises and exposes the plain of his flat stomach as he hoists himself up onto a horse to ride with Robb and Jon.

Jeyne says the same thing she said years ago. “He’s very handsome, isn’t he?”

Gendry catches Sansa’s eye, finds her staring at him just as all the other girls do. Sansa flushes.

“I suppose,” Sansa replies. She turns away from Gendry.

At dinner Sansa preoccupies herself with her meat. Arya attempts to speak to her and is ignored. Rickon tugs at her sleeve, desperate for attention, and Sansa shushes him. She can not shake the presence of Gendry Baratheon, sat a handful of seats away from her.

She chances a look at him when the kitchens bring them desert.

She finds him already looking at her.

Sansa has retired to her bedchambers when Stannis Baratheon speaks with her father.

“You have beautiful daughters,” Stannis says, hands folded together. “And I have a son.”

“Arya is very young,” Ned Stark replies. “Compared to your boy. Regardless of how well they get along.”

“Yes, but,” Stannis leans forward, drawing Ned in with a lowering of his voice, “there is the matter of your first daughter. There is the matter of Sansa.”

**IV.**

Stannis Baratheon does not visit Winterfell a third time. Instead, he summons Ned Stark and his family to Dragonstone.

Ned Stark tells his children one night just before they are taken off to bed.

Sansa already knows what’s happening — can feel it in the pit of her stomach — before her father even speaks. She can tell in the way his eyebrows mimic the straight, tight line of his mouth. She is old enough. She is seven and ten. It seems everyday now her Septa reminds her her first blood is creeping around the corner. That soon she will be a woman meant to carry a man’s children. A bunch of chubby little lords and ladies, who will carry on her face and hair and smile for her long after she is gone and will carry their fathers name.

She knew this day was coming.

“Will Gendry be there?” Arya asks without pause. Her eyes are bright. Sansa’s stomach twists into knots at the mention of his name.

Bran rolls his eyes, still a child but already growing to be the smartest of all his siblings. “He’s marrying Sansa,” Bran mocks Arya, “of course he’s going to be there.” Arya shoves him in return.

Sansa feels as if the whole room has been set on fire, and her whole family is just pretending as if nothing is happening.

Robb pulls Bran and Arya apart, hoisting Arya up and a foot away from Bran. Ned’s smile is tight and he tells Robb to show his brothers and sister off to bed. Then his eyes turn to Sansa, on her hands, first, which are wrung together tightly, and then they travel upwards towards her placid face. Sansa does not move. She knows without having to be asked that her father would like for her to linger a little longer.

“Sansa,” he says, once they’re alone. He says her name as if it’s the last time he may say it, and then says nothing else. As if he cannot find the words.

“Should I pack as if I do not intended to return?” Sansa asks simply.

“I am very proud of you, Sansa,” her father replies, not an answer to her question, directly, but an answer all the same. “He is a nice young boy who will be gentle and kind to you. I promise. I would never —” he tries to say more and falters once again. Eddard Stark has never been a man for many words.

And so he smiles sadly at his eldest daughter, hugs her tightly, and sends her off to bed.

That night Lady sleeps curled into Sansa’s side, as if she knows what’s happening. Sansa will have to leave her soon, she supposes. A dire wolf as far south as Dragonstone would be a lonely, sad animal.

When Sansa imagined the day she knew she would be married when she was younger, she always imagined as happy. She had thought it would make her whole life and everything she was taught and learned make sense. That she would be overcome with a sense of calm, of purpose, of life and love.

But Sansa does not feel any of those things. With her hand buried deep into Lady’s fur, in a bedroom that is hers now now but will not be hers for very much longer, all she feels is scared and sad.

**V.**

Sansa’s new husband drapes the cloak of his House over her shoulders. It stirs the air around her as he does it; almost as if the proud Stag on the back did bolster itself upright in a show of pride. The only stag to ever overtake a dire wolf.

Then, Gendry kisses her. A press of his closed mouth, with his hand posed gently against Sansa’s cheek. Gendry’s mouth is as soft and wet as his hand is rough and dry.

They have barely spoken a dozen words to each other. Sansa does her best not to tremble.

“It’s Gendry,” Arya had said earlier, watching Sansa’s handmaids pin her hair and then her dress. “Makes no sense for you to be so nervous.”

Sansa did not want to say to Arya that _Gendry_ meant something different to Sansa then it did for Arya. She did not want to have to explain it. In Gendry, Arya saw the comfort of a friend, the smile of someone she knew. She had no need to think of Gendry’s body underneath of his clothes.

What Sansa sees is — well, she does not wish to dwell on that, either. No use even mentioning the idea of it to Arya. She was too young to understand, Sansa told herself.

They share a marriage bed.

Sansa finds the banner men of Dragonstone hoot and holler for the bedding less so than the crowds gathered for weddings in the North do. Maybe it’s the perceived properness of the South that keeps them quiet. Or maybe it’s their Lord, silent and stoic as he is, and his people simply follow. Sansa finds she is thankful for it.

In the end, it is Robb who undresses her and leaves her in her bedchamber with a kiss to her forehead. It feels as if hours pass before Gendry enters after her, freed of his shirt but still dressed in his pants.

Gendry is big and broad even more so with his clothes off. The expanse from one of his shoulders to the other is seemingly never ending. He dwarfs Sansa in both length and width. That’s the way it’s mean to be, isn’t it? The strong husband and his gentle wife.

Gendry holds Sansa as if he’s trying to keep her from shattering apart. As if she is something precious but so fragile, a wounded baby bird or an old vase already missing a shard and cracked down the middle. She hates it; she does not want him to look at her like that. She has done nothing to deserve that look. She has kept herself from trembling, she has not cried. She had not even gazed forlornly across the long table at the head of the Great Hall to watch a family that isn’t hers anymore.

She wants him to stop touching her like that. She wants to make him stop looking at her like that.

“I’m sorry,” he breathes against the skin of her shoulder and a word that Sansa hadn’t even spoken herself sours in her mouth.

He lays with her twice that night; Sansa watches Gendry’s face as he hovers above her and looks even closer when he leans against her with his whole body to kiss her. His face is hard and thick, like the rest of him, set heavy in it’s brow and jaw.

She supposes, if nothing else, the two of them will make pretty babies.

**VI.**

Dragonstone is ugly and it is cold.

The North had been cold, always cold, but Dragonstone is not the same kind of cold. The North was a bone deep chill and those born into it could grow in it, with icicle shards in their very bones, and find themselves used to it. The cold in Dragonstone is superficial. As if a good, bright and sunny day is just on the horizon. But the bright, sunny day never comes and no one ever gets used to the cold.

The dampness of the sea permeates through the castles dark halls, marked with carvings of Dragons at every corner, and it makes everything slick. Sansa presses a palm against the stone of the fortress and it comes away wet.

She wonders if all this mold and wet-thicked air existed when the Targaeryan’s kept the fires in these halls burning. She supposes it doesn’t much matter. The Targaeryan’s don’t live her anymore.

Gendry tries to show her the finer points of Dragonstone, if you can call them that. He shows her the towers; The Windwyrm and The Sea Dragon. He takes her to the uppermost floor of the Stone Drum and shows her the Painted Table.

It is sprawling in height and length. It’s beautiful, too; if nothing else but a marvel of craftsmanship and times dedicated to a single task. Sansa touches the wood with the tips of her fingers, unsure if it is really allowed.

Stannis spends most of his time in this room, Gendry with him, and Sansa has not dared to ask if she is even allowed to be here.

She touches the engraving of _Winterfell_ etched into the table and feels a tug in her heart.

"Do you miss it?” Gendry asks her. Sansa opens her mouth to placate him, to give him the answer that people would have her say to make them happy then the truth, but Gendry stops her. “Will you give me a real answer?” He asks her, “you always speak to me like we’ve only just met. We’re married.”

Sansa is silent for a moment. She wants to say _we have only just met_ but something stops her. Sansa doesn’t mean to be distant. How does she explain that marriage is not what she had expected it to be? Not that it’s bad. Gendry is not an awful husband. It’s just different, everything is different. Not a single thing is the way Sansa expected it to be.

She wonders if little boys grow up dreaming of their wedding days the way they teach little girls too. Sansa doesn’t think so. Maybe Gendry had expectations about his wife, about the woman who would be the Lady to his Lord of Dragonstone, and may be he is disappointed with Sansa. But it’s not the same. It’s different for girls.

She decides to tell the truth. If nothing else, her husband will appreciate the honesty.

“I do,” Sansa finally replies, everything coming spilling out of her like a pot left to over boil. “I miss my family very much. Everyday. I miss them more than I thought possible. My brothers, even my sister. Sometimes I wish I speak to my mother because I feel as if I have a million questions for her, questions I forget every time I try and write to her.”

Gendry’s expression does not even shift. He reminds Sansa so much of Stannis when he does that; harden his expression to stone, only watching to understand others, never letting people understand his thoughts in return.

Sansa feels as if she’s cracked her breastbone open and let the whole world see her heart beating through her flesh. She shifts away from the Painted Table, fingers lingering against the decorated wood that is meant to be her home. Then, Gendry’s hand is upon her elbow, turning her body towards him.

He kisses her sweetly. As if anyone could imagine a boy so burly as him could be sweet. But he is — he presses Sansa gently into the Painted Table, her hips bumping into a corner of it, he holds her waist with one large hand and cradles her jaw with the other, fingers splayed down her throat. Sansa finds herself trying to lean into every place he touches. Sansa feels regret for making him think she was pushing him away. Perhaps he has been trying in ways she didn’t even realize. Her head is still a mess of feelings, waves of expectations crashing against the rocks of reality. Of her past, present and future combining in an explosion that she cannot sometimes contain in her head.

“I’m sorry,” Gendry whispers after he pulls away, quietly, into the breath of space left between their two mouths.

There’s no reason for him to apologize; he is not an evil man who has trapped Sansa in a tower, locked her away and fought off any hope of rescue. He is at fault no more than Sansa is, born into a line of Lords. He’s said those same words before and Sansa had hated it.

This time, though, Sansa finds a comfort in them.

**VII.**

Gendry loves his little sister more than he loves anyone else in the world.

Sansa should not be jealous, though she finds she is. Gendry possesses a unique gentleness with Shireen that he shares with no one else. A gentleness he does not share with Sansa (though he is gentle with her, always gentle) and a gentleness that Sansa would never share with her own siblings.

Sansa takes in the scar that mars Shireen’s innocent, pretty face with despair and considers that perhaps the threat of nearly losing her is the reason Gendry clutches Shireen just a little tighter. Perhaps it is the reason he relents to any request she makes of him. She had but to tug at her brother’s sleeve and ask him something like, “Gendry, will you take me to the seaside with me?” and he will agree without hesitation.

There are other ways Sansa finds herself jealous of Shireen.

(And it is indeed only jealous — unimportant and superficial — and not envy. Envy is evil and ugly and Sansa does not wish any harm towards Shireen. The girl has wrapped her fingers around Sansa’s heart the same as she has her own brother. She does a great many things with Sansa that Arya never would have.)

Sansa is jealous that Shireen still possesses her childhood and in a world where everyone always tells high born girls how they should act and what they should do, Shireen has remained truly herself. She is jealous of the way no one reminds Shireen that her most important duty in life will arrive the day she marries.

Not even Lady Selyse speaks to Shireen of marriage.

It is relief born out of cruelty and Sansa feels awful for wishing she herself had been afforded it. And yet she wishes for it all the same.

The only person who ever allows the idea of marriage to pass their lips is Gendry. Shireen asks him, “do you think I’ll make a good wife?”

“A good wife, a good mother and a good Lady,” Gendry replies, “those last two are the most important, anyway. Who cares about the first one?”

Shireen smiles. “You have a good wife,” she tells him, “but you really think so?” The wonder in Shireen’s voice makes her seem even younger.

Gendry returns her smile, taps the tip of her nose with his finger. “I know so,” he tells her, “but we’ll have to find you a very smart husband, won’t we? Otherwise, I think you’ll find him very boring.”

Sansa is not sure what to think of Stannis Baratheon as a father.

She would not call him an awful one. He is good to his children, he does not berate them or beat them. There is a coldness in his demeanour that is inescapable, however, and that keeps his children’s at arm’s length. As if no one told him or taught him how to be a proper father and he has never managed to learn it along the way.

She wonders if Gendry will treat the children Sansa gives him the same. She cannot imagine a tiny, barely born Gendry snuggled into Stannis Baratheon’s chest. She cannot imagine the loving hand of a father place on Gendry’s back while he might have fussed as a babe.

Sansa tries to picture Gendry doing things she could never imagine Stannis doing. The pictures end up half-painted; as if halfway through it the artist lost their passion for it.

Lady Selyse, for her part, is — interesting.

She is not like Sansa’s own mother. She is every picture of a cowering, sad wife Sansa had ever imagined as a child. Because not all stories are happy ones; for every prince and princess who married and had babies and were happy, there were the evil wives who tormented their husbands, sad wives who never realized the ways to make their husbands happy, woman who had no husbands at all.

It is much more complicated then it looks, though. Sansa can not imagine what it must have been like to have so many babies pulled from you already gone from this world; she can not imagine having to say goodbye before ever being given the chance to say hello.

Sansa wonders if Lord Stannis and Lady Selyse had ever been like her and Gendry. What they must have been like when they were young, newly married, and when they had so many idea of what was to come for them. She wonders what things were like after Gendry was born. A first born son, heir to Dragonstone, strong and healthy. And she wonders what it was like when everything turned ugly for every other son that came after him. The relief when they finally, _finally_ welcome a second baby into this world, the horror at almost losing her, at losing at least a piece of her forever.

Sansa and Gendry have been married nearly half a year when Lady Selyse mentions it for the first time.

“Sansa, dear,” she says, tight smile looking like it’s about to tear her face in half. “Do you lay with Gendry every night?”

**VIII.**

The light of the fire reflects against against the already honey coloured skin of Gendry’s chest and stomach. He looks as if he smells of rich and dark things: ale, cooked meat, the wood they used to build the Painted Table.

(Earlier, Lady Selyse had said, “you want babies before the long winter, don’t you?” As if she knew every sad, scary story Sansa had heard about the endings of summers.)

Sansa understands her duty, the way all Starks do. She is a pretty young Lady who was married to a Lord for no reason then to birth him little sons. And so she welcomes her husband into their bed, hair falling around her like a halo, sheer nightgown falling against her body like water.

Gendry is always gentle with her. He touches her inner thigh to spread her legs apart farther, fits himself into the space he makes. He kisses Sansa’s mouth, her cheek, her jaw and her throat. It is moments like this that Sansa can imagine she is the princess of all the stories she knows; moments like this she can imagine her and Gendry are here because they loved each other and that it has nothing to do with duty.

Sansa wraps her legs around Gendry’s waist once he’s inside of her. He is slow and methodical, never loosing himself in it, in the heat and velvet of Sansa’s body. Sansa digs her nails into Gendry shoulders and waits for him to finish.

“What would,” Sansa begins, after Gendry has rolled off of her and a beat of silence has passed. “If something was wrong with me — If I — if things happened like they did with your mother.”

“You’re not my mother,” Gendry cuts her off. “You are not my mother and you share no blood with her.”

“It feels as if the whole of Dragonstone is holding it’s breath, waiting for us to have a baby,” Sansa continues. “Your mother especially.”

“My mother is impatient,” Gendry counters. “She tried to have babies too late and her body wasn’t made for it. So she got one boy, a lot of misery, and a sick little girl after waiting for so long. She’s impatient and she is worried.”

Sansa turns onto her side, taking in the side of her husbands face. “There are people who have been married for less time then we have who are already halfway to having a child.” It’s true. Catelyn Stark had fallen pregnant with Robb not long after she had married Eddard, and Sansa is sure they would have managed to have another baby before her if her father had not had gone off to war. Sansa came quickly after he returned, anyway.

“Are you worried?” Sansa asks her husband, more scared then she had been the night she learned she would leave her family forever so she could marry him.

“I am not worried.” Gendry insists. “It’ll happen when it happens. Worrying about it will only make it more difficult,” he turns onto his side to face Sansa, tucking a piece of her hair behind her ear. “So don’t.”

That night Sansa has an awful, awful dream.

In it she does not marry Gendry Baratheon. No, she marries his cousin Joffrey and he is awful and cruel to Sansa. He hurts her and no one seems to care. She gets to be a Princess, but the fantasy turns into dark ash in her hands, slips between her fingers, and leaves her with nothing but dirt all over her hands. And then they spread across the rest of her, and no matter how hard she scrubs at her skin she can not make them disappear.

And Gendry — Gendry marries Arya. And he looks at Arya in ways he has never looked at Sansa and Arya gives him the same looks in return. _They love each other_ , Sansa thinks in her dream. They love each other and, oh, Arya has already given Gendry a child. A son and heir. And she is about to give him another. And Sansa has nothing but dirt and pain.

It is an an awful, awful dream. Sansa wakes with her heart pounding and her breath coming out fast. She spends what feels like days staring at the ceiling of her bedchamber, before she attaches herself to her still sleeping husband, and manages to close her eyes again and drift into sleep.

It is the first time she falls asleep curled against Gendry and, in the morning, will be the first time she wakes in his arms as well. But even tucked against the warmth of her husband, his heart beating against the press of her ear, Sansa cannot shake the feeling that her dream was truly only that — a dream.

Perhaps it was simply a road she had avoided travelling.

**IX.**

Time passes. Sansa spends time in Aegon’s Garden with Shireen and Gendry spends time with his father and it feels as if the entire crown crownlands waits for Sansa’s belly to swell.

A raven arrives from Winterfell: it’s Sansa’s mother, telling Sansa her brother will wed Princess Myrcella soon and they are thinking of having Arya wed Trystane of House Martell, because she must marry, and Dorne may suit her better than any other region.

Sansa tries not think about how awful it would be if her newly married siblings managed to have babies before her and Gendry.

(Sansa does not want to say the lack of child splinters her and Gendry. And maybe it does not splinter them apart but it does put a wedge between them, driven there by a hammer and force. Sansa does not hate Gendry and Gendry does not hate Sansa — but these feelings are the sort of feelings that foster in far worse ones.

It all depends on where things go from here.)

They lay together every night.

Sansa sits astride her husband and he is inside of her. She rolls her hips forward and digs her nails into his firm shoulders.

(The first time they had tried it this way, Gendry had said, _this is not how they say you make babies_ and Sansa had not replied. Gendry had said nothing after that, either, and he did not say anything, again, the next night when Sansa positioned herself in his lap once again.)

Gendry has one hand curled around Sansa’s hip and the other cupped around her breast, thumb grazing across her nipple. His chest is damp with sweat, wetness catching the dim candlelight in their bedchamber and reflecting it back. Sansa can tell Gendry wants to kiss her but she keeps back straight, rolling her hips down against his, repositioning her arm behind her, so she can grip Gendry’s thigh. She does not lean down to press their mouths together.

Gendry repositions his hands so the pair of them grip Sansa’s hips, pulling her down harder against the upwards thrust of his cock. He is always quiet when they fuck; only lets out small grunts and groans and almost always only lets them slip when his mouth is against Sansa’s skin.

Sansa wonders if this would be easier, if it was more about love and less about duty. And she hates the though, so she pushes it away, and focuses on the way Gendry fills her, thick and warm, and moans hotly into the big, empty space of their bedchamber. They fuck for a few beats longer, silent saved for laboured breaths.

Then, with the skin of Sansa’s collarbone fresh with Gendry’s spit and her cunt filled with his cock, Gendry comes before her and she follows.

Because it’s about duty.

Shireen asks Sansa when she will have her brother’s baby, one day, and the words are so innocent and come from such a place of love that it almost makes Sansa cry.

Shireen does not ask because she wonders why Sansa’s body won’t agree with what the world expects of her. Shireen asks because she is excited to be an aunt. Because she has been taught children bring the biggest piece of happiness in the world with them upon their arrival, and she wants that for Sansa and her brother.

For the first time, Sansa’s frustration morphs into an all consuming hopelessness. Her body feels waited down with it. She barely speaks for the rest of the day.

When Gendry retires to their bedchamber late into the night, Sansa does not part her legs to welcome him. She has already blown out every candle and settled under the blankets, on the side of her body that will keep her back to Gendry, pretending to be fast asleep.

She listens to him shed his clothes quietly, feels the weight of his body dip the bed beside her. Sansa half-expects him to reach over and turn her onto her back, slide on top of her and lay with her the way they are expected to. But he doesn’t — he touches her bare shoulder gently, kisses the spot above where his fingers lay, and settles into his side of their bed without a word.

Sansa lets out an exhale she hadn’t realized she had been holding.

**X.**

Gendry does not lay with Sansa for days.

He spends his time late into the night with his father, discussing things Sansa feels she has no right to ask about. He hardly ever retires for the night before Sansa has fallen asleep.

Even when he comes to their bedchambers and Sansa is still awake, dressed in only a thin nightdress and even when she stands and helps her husband undress down to his small clothes — he does not touch her. He kisses her forehead or her brow, sometimes her mouth, but he never takes it further.

Sansa considers what she might say if Lady Selyse presses her about laying with Gendry again. Would she lie? Or would she break open with honesty, would she tell Lady Selyse she is afraid she has turned Gendry away, that he has finally decided to be done with her. Maybe they’ll never have children, now, and Gendry will only have bastards named Waters with maidens and whores. Maybe Tommen will be the one to inherit Dragonstone after Gendry.

And when they tell these stories in a thousand years they will call him Gendry Baratheon the Childless and they will call Sansa the Lady Wolf Who Bore No Pups. And there story will be a sad one, a cautionary tale about choosing the right wife.

**XI.**

It has been fortnight since Gendry has laid with her when Sansa breaks.

She had three cups of wine with dinner and when her husband had found his way to their bedchambers earlier than any other night in days, she was waiting for him, sat straight-backed on their bed, hands folded into her lap. The hearth was lit with a large fire, dancing shadows across the big, empty room.

“Do you hate me?” Sansa asks, voice wet with wine and eyes wet with tears. She had been thinking on it for hours and she had still not yet decided which would hurt her more: Gendry’s hatred of a wife who had yet to give him any children, or his ultimate forgiveness of a woman he had come to care for.

“You are my wife,” was Gendry’s answer.

“There are plenty of husbands who hate their wives,” and Sansa could not keep a single, heavy sob from escaping out of her.

Gendry was in front of her, then, kneeling on the floor in front of her, with his hands framing her face. They were as warm and rough as they were the day they married, a day a length of time away that Sansa hates to quatify. He presses his forehand against Sansa’s, wiping away tears with the pad of his thumb.

“Sansa,” he speaks in whispers. Just her name, over and over, for what feels like forever, until he continues. “I do not hate you. I could never hate you,” Gendry insists. “If we did not have children for years, I would not hate you. If we did not have a single child until we were as old and as grey as my father, I would not hate you. We could have not have children ever, Sansa,” he kisses her temple after he speaks her name again, “and I would not hate you even then.”

Then Gendry says, “I’m sorry,” a pair of words that had meant different things when he spoke them to Sansa in the past. Before they had made her things like angry or thankful, or she had found comfort in them. And yet, now, in this moment, felt as if it would be the most important time Gendry would ever say them.

Sansa kisses her husband. For the first time in what is too long, Gendry does not gently pull her away by her wrists. Instead, he leans into the press of her mouth and, simultaneously, curves a whole arm around Sansa’s waist so he can pull her closer as he stands them both up.

This kiss — silhouetted in warm yellow light from the fire, on a late evening after she has already been married for months and months — this kiss is the closest to any of the kisses Sansa imagined when she heard all those stories when she was younger.

 _These are the kind of kisses husbands give wives_ , she would have thought as a child. Now, as a woman, she thinks, _this is my husband and I am his wife and I want him_.

Sansa hooks a leg around her husbands waist, balanced against the cradle of his arm around her waist. Gendry responds by gripping her tighter, purposefully sliding a thick thigh between Sansa’s legs to better support her. She cannot help the way she rocks her hips down against it when he does; the feeling sends a shock through her whole body and turns her bones to dripping honey when she thinks that, once they shed their clothes, this will be a skin to skin contact.

Gendry’s touches are like the rest of him, purposeful and hard, not lightness or grace to him. Sansa remembers when she saw him for the very first time and she knew he was going to be big and broad, like every other Baratheon, and how she had still be surprised when she saw him transform that way.

Gendry was never the delicate longsword, he was always the heavy war hammer.

Gendry slips his fingers under Sansa’s nightgown, dragging his palm along the curve of her soft, pale thigh, before he finds her wet between the apex of both of her thighs. He never does this much — use his fingers — and he never, ever, does this with as much purpose as he does now. Most nights, his fingers are simply a means to an end. Tonight, every press and drag and movement of Gendry’s fingers feels is purposeful. As if this is all that matters, just this moment, and he is not even thinking about what comes after it.

Sansa is shaking, her arms and legs burn from keeping herself upright against her husband, desperate for his warmth against her body and his fingers inside of her. Everything inside burns and melts too.

“Gendry, Gendry, Gendry,” her hands scramble for purchase against his shoulders while she struggles to find words besides his name. He understands, anyway, and pulls his fingers out from her only to lift her off her feet and deposit her onto their bed.

Sansa sheds her clothes as fast she can and Gendry does the same, leaving everything in a mess across the floor. Sansa wants Gendry’s fingers again, so much so she almost grabs his wrist to direct his hand between her legs, but Gendry is already slinking lower. And then his mouth on her, making wet and ugly noises that she doesn’t care about, because the feeling she was missing has returned.

Gendry is quiet as he always is but Sansa is not. She threads her fingers into Gendry’s short-cropped dark hair and arches into the press of his tongue against her cunt and let’s out a long, breathless moan.

Sansa wants to scream. She feels as if she’s being pulled apart and stitched back together and the same time and she wants to scream. Instead, she shoves three knuckles into her mouth and bites down, groaning around them. Gendry laves his tongue against her and pushes two fingers inside of her cunt, wet from her and wet from his mouth, and Sansa thinks nothing will ever feel as sweet as this.

She thinks that this not something she ever imagined happened between husbands and wives when she was a girl.

When Gendry lifts himself from the heat between Sansa’s legs and finds her mouth with his again, he says, “you are delicious,” and _Gods_ , if that isn’t one of the most awful, wonderful things Sansa has ever heard.

Sansa wishes to spread herself on top of him but before she can, as if he read her mind, Gendry grips one of her thighs tightly in his grip and pulls her until she is sat in his lap. She can feel his hard cock pressed against her, almost there but not quite. Sansa rolls her hips as she did earlier, when they were still clothed, and it as she thought: nothing is ever quite as good as skin to skin.

This is the longest they have made love (and that’s a new thought: _made love_ ) during the whole of their marriage. Sansa finds she would not mind if it never ended.

Gendry brings himself to his end inside of Sansa, inside the velvet heat of her, with their mouths open against one another’s — searching for things they will be content to never find, things they would be content to search for forever.

“Gendry,” Sansa breathes out, collapsed against his chest. She wants to say more, she wants to say, _thank you, I love you, please, I’m sorry, thank you, believe me_ but all the words get caught in her throat.

Gendry touches the skin of her back just below where her hair rests. “Sansa,” he says, the same way she said his name, as if there are so many things left unsaid, and it’s fine for them to leave them that way.

**XII.**

They are married almost two full years before Maester Cressen tells Sansa she will have Gendry’s child.

Sansa is given the gift of telling her family in person. They travel to Winterfell for Robb’s wedding to Myrcella Baratheon, and Sansa confesses her wonderful, wonderful secret after she refuses wine with her supper the first night.

“Careful,” Robb laughs after they announce it, “she’s got Tully blood. Once she pops out one baby, she won’t be able to stop.” Robb looks happy. Sansa wonders how much he’s been able to speak to Myrcella since their betrothal years ago. Myrcella had been young, and so they had waited for her to age, and Robb had been given so much more time to adjust and know his wife then Sansa and Gendry had been afforded.

“You say that as if she does all the work, Stark,” Gendry replies. “Baratheon men are very good at making children. Ask my uncle.” Both men are laughing now.

Gendry is only teasing, Sansa knows, it is all bark with none of the bite. Gendry is proud of Sansa. He’s been proud since she first told him. His eyes had been so full of wonder when she did, in a way that reminded Sansa of Shireen. Gendry looked at Sansa as if she had hung the moon in the sky, as if she could do anything in that moment. And for that moment, after waiting and wishing and wanting for so long and having Gendry look at her the way he did, Sansa believed she could.

“Gendry will be a good father,” Catelyn tells Sansa quietly, smiling. Her eyes are still wet from when she had hugged Sansa and cried.

“He will,” Sansa nods. She thanks the Old Gods, the Gods she abandoned to marry her husband so she could give him this child, for allowing her that.

Robb marries Myrcella Baratheon in the godswood at Winterfell.

In a mirrored reflection of Sansa’s own wedding, he drapes the cloak of House Stark over the shoulders of a girl from House Baratheon and it is beautiful and sweet when Robb kisses Myrcella in the shadow of the weirwood trees.

**VIX.**

Gendry wants Sansa to pick the child’s name.

“Son’s take their father’s family names,” Sansa insists. She is sure she carries a boy inside of her, a son and heir. “Those are the names that are handed down. Give him a Baratheon name. We can call him Steffon.”

“After the grandfather I never met?”

Sansa shrugs. “We could name him Robert,” she tries again, “after the King.” Gendry offers no verbal reply to this, only makes a face. “After your own father, then.”

“Stannis is an awful name for a baby,” Gendry shakes his head. “There are no Baratheon’s worth naming the child after, Sansa, I promise,” he says, “if we are lucky he’ll be Wolf than Stag, anyway. Give him a Stark name.”

Babies named for the Old Gods, replaced by babies named in the Light of the Seven.

Sansa has always been more her mother than her father. Robb and Arya are Starks through and through, Rickon mostly amongst them. Bran sits somewhere in the middle. But Sansa is undoubtedly a Tully girl. Even Jon was more of a Stark then Sansa had ever been, in every way besides his name. And no one ever called Sansa a wolf in anyway that was for her own actions and not those of the family she came from; they only ever compared Sansa to little birds.

She supposes it doesn’t matter. Sansa is a Baratheon now, a stag, and she is trying to name the Baratheon child that her Baratheon husband has put inside of her. With a Northern name.

Sansa writes to her mother on the matter. Catelyn tells her she thinks Rickard will suit the baby. Eddard Stark suggests Brandon. Her mother writes, mostly, to tell her that is not worth worrying too much over. When Sansa would find the right name she would know.

She settles on Torrhen.

“Torrhen Baratheon,” Gendry rolls the name around in his mouth, syllable by syllable. His expression is neither pleased nor displeased, but Gendry is always placid and hard in his face. “And who was Torrhen Stark?”

There has not been a Torrhen Stark in years. The last one —

“The last King in the North,” Sansa tells Gendry the story she remembers from when she was a child. Her hands cradle the swell of her belly, rounded out now. “Before he bent the knew to Aegon the Conqueror.”

“Ah,” Gendry nods, “and so we’ll be raising a usurper? The future King to take back the North?”

“We are not,” Sansa frowns, swatting at her husbands chest. Her son won’t even be Warden of the North. That is the title for Robb’s children. “Our son is a Baratheon, not a Stark,” she says to Gendry, “the North only knows kings whose names our Stark. And don’t say things like that, either. Your uncle is King and your cousin will be King after him. Our son will be Lord of Dragonstone.”

Gendry is laughing quietly, but there is a lilt of something deeper in his voice when he says, “it’s funny how you say it that way.” Something hidden in his voice when he says, “it wouldn’t be the first castle a Baratheon would have stolen.”

**XV.**

Sansa’s favourite stories when she was growing up were the ones about true love.

She had asked to hear them all, over and over again. She asked to hear of every pretty princess and their handsome princes and the flowers and the presents and the smiles.

True love, the love at first sight she had grown up waiting for it — it was not something she had with Gendry. They had come far from those days, Sansa and her husband, but still. It was never the way they told it in stories.

But Sansa feels the closest thing to her imagining of true love — a love at first sight kind of love, a love that burns bright and forever — when she meets her son.

Torrhen Baratheon is born during the last day of a week long thunderstorm, in the darkness of late night. The screams of his birth are drowned out by the sound of thunder.

Torrhen has thick black hair to match Gendry’s from the very moment he is born. His face is chubby, adorable, and peppered with the odd cluster of reckless that mark him the small quarter Tully-blooded that he is.

Even when he is days old, Torrhen does not cry much. He is a very good baby.

Gendry sits at Sansa’s bedside and cradles their son. Torrhen is large for a baby, everyone keeps telling Sansa so. Maester Cressen, who had delivered Gendry, had told her Gendry was the biggest babe he had ever seen, until he met Torrhen. Gendry insists big and healthy is how every Baratheon boy should be. But here, posed in Gendry’s arms, Torrhen could be as ams all as a kitchen mouse.

The boy stirs in his sleep, just slightly, before he settles again. Gendry smiles down at him.

“Thank you,” Gendry will tell Sansa, later, when they share their bed with their new son asleep between them.

Perhaps Sansa did not find the love she knew from stories in Gendry. She decides it does not matter, she loves in a different, perfectly lovely way.

She loves him enough as the other half that brought her son into the world.

**XVI.**

Sansa takes only a short week confined to her bed to recover from Torrhen’s birth. She welcomes visitors in that time.

Stannis visits with his wife and Shireen, stony-faced as always, taking a rare moment away from the Steel Drum and the Painted Table. He does not ask to hold Torrhen. “He looks healthy,” is all Stannis offers in the way of words. Somehow, that still manages to be more than Sansa had been expecting. Lady Selyse, in turn, says to Sansa, “you are made to have babies, child,” and smiles, gazing at Torrhen with sadness lurking behind the curve of her mouth.

Shireen, bless her pure heart, is in love with Torrhen from the moment she sees him.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t let me see him,” Shireen confesses to Sansa, quiet so her parents don’t hear, as she holds her nephew, who is newly fed and swaddled and very content. “Mother said I shouldn’t be upset if you turned me away.”

“Why would we turn you away?”

“Because of my,” Shireen starts, then falters. Sansa’s heart twists.

“Oh,” she says and her throat feels numb. “Don’t worry, Shireen. Look,” Sansa points to Torrhen, who gurgles in Shireen’s arms, big, dark eyes trained on Shireen’s face, as if she is the only thing in the world. “He loves you so much, how could I keep him away from his favourite aunt?”

Shireen beams. She leans down and rubs her nose against Torrhen’s and the baby presses his hand against Shireen’s unscarred cheek.

**XVII.**

Torrhen is still a gurgling baby and barely halfway to his first name day when Stannis and Lady Selyse are called to King’s Landing for Prince Joffrey’s wedding to the Tyrell girl.

“You will go instead of me,” Stannis tells Gendry.

Gendry’s brow furrows. “My son is an infant,” he replies, “and you’d have me take him all the way to King’s Landing?”

Stannis sighs. He is always so exasperated with everything, Sansa has noticed. “It is your cousin’s wedding,” Stannis insists, “and you are attending as the future Lord of Dragonstone, presenting your new son to the court. You’ll parade around your heir the way I paraded you after you were born.”

Sansa rests her hand on Gendry’s shoulder. “Torrhen is a very good baby,” she says to her husband gently, “and it’s not far. The journey will not be too difficult.”

Torrhen’s wet nurse will need to make the journey with them, Sansa thinks, but she does not mention that part.

“Listen to your wife,” Stannis speaks before Gendry can. “It will do you good to gain the habit now.”

Later, in their bedchamber, Gendry shrugs off his shirt and bristles with frustration.

“It’s not about showing off my heir,” he says, out loud. Sansa and Torrhen are the only people in the room, and Gendry is speaking at a normal volume, but it is as if he is still speaking more to himself than the two of them. Not as if Torrhen would understand, anyway. “It’s about him wanting to stay locked up in Dragonstone, being sullen and angry at his brother forever.”

Torrhen makes a noise, entire fist stuck into his mouth, happy as he always is and oblivious to the world around him.

“All the more reason for us to go,” Sansa replies. “Because he will never go himself. And for House Baratheon of Dragonstone to miss the future King’s wedding — that would be worse.”

Sansa swaddles Torrhen in his blankets tighter and leaves him to babble nonsense, laid on his parents bed. She stands, then, and places her hands on the curve of Gendry’s biceps. Gendry sighs, the same way his father always does. “I am just,” he explains, “frustrated. And glad I never had any brothers.”

Sansa smiles. She kisses Gendry and says to him, “welcome to being a Lord.”

**XVIII.**

Sansa is right: the ship they travel to King’s Landing through Blackwater Bay and the sea agrees with Torrhen. He has never fallen asleep faster than he does when rocked by the waves. Must be the Tully in him.

“Do you think,” Sansa begins to ask, before she is stopping herself short.

Gendry presses. “What is it?”

“Nothing. Just,” Sansa eyes her son, the quick rise and fall of his chest while he sleeps. She takes in the dark hair that matches his Baratheon family, the auburn freckles that remind Sansa of her mother, the weight of his jaw that makes him a Northerner. “Do you suppose my family will be there?”

Gendry rolls his shoulders back, loosening the muscles. “The Crown does love attention. I expect every Great House in Westeros in invited,” he replies, really only confirming things Sansa already knew.

Sansa doesn’t understand how Gendry talks down so much of a seat on the Iron Throne. A seat he is technically in line for (he is fourth, fourth in lin. In front of him: Prince Joffrey, who will be King soon after he is married, and then Prince Tommen. Gendry’s father follows, and then Gendry himself does. After Gendry would be Torrhen, which is a strange thought. There is a version of this history where Sansa has birthed a King after all).

“I’m sure the North will send someone. Robb, I’d imagine.”

Sansa listens to the juxtaposition of sounds: from the quiet breathing of her son and the loud crash of the sea against the ship. If her brother is there, he will be the first Stark to ever meet her son. Torrhen, her son, who is not a Stark by name — but is a Stark, undeniably, in his blood.

Sansa has never seen the Red Keep before.

Gendry spent time in King’s Landing as a child, he tells Sansa. Just after Shireen was born and Stannis was serving as Master of Ships, Gendry tried to keep himself busy among all the adults who had no time for him and his cousin who Gendry wished he would never have time for.

“I hated it,” he tells Sansa, “a bunch of people too big for their small clothes. And Joffrey was a little cunt but I had to be nice to him because he was going to be King, of course. I spent half my days here trying to avoid him.”

Sansa wonders what the Tyrell girl must think of her future husband. Sansa had been upset, scared, at the thought of marrying Gendry — she could not imagine what it would have felt like if she was to be married to Joffrey.

They are brought before the King when they first arrive.

“My favourite nephew,” he calls out in his big, bellowing voice. He throws an arm around Gendry, jostling him, and Sansa can smell him from she stands at Gendry’s side, holding a sleeping Torrhen. He reeks of wine. “And his pretty wife and new babe. How are you, girl?”

Sansa has met King Robert Baratheon only once before this, a long time ago, before Bran and before Rickon, when he had come to Winterfell to visit her father. He looks much the same, if not rounder in his face and stomach. If he smelt the way during that visit as well, Sansa cannot remember.

Sansa returns the greeting and then the King asks to see her baby.

“The little Lord,” he says, “let me see him.” Robert’s voice is so loud and the Throne Room is so big, so empty, and everything echoes. Torrhen, though, always the perfect baby, does not cry. He snuffles and shifts about in Sansa’s arms, just so, but he does not cry.

Sansa wishes he would. She’d have an excuse to take him away if he cried. Instead, she pulls back the blankets from his face to show the King, all round and pink and soft. “He’s handsome, isn’t he? You make good babies, nephew.”

Gendry thanks his uncle, who asks for the babies name. “Torrhen, your Grace.”

“Torrhen Baratheon,” King Robert laughs and he says the name. “A good old Northern name for a little Southern Lord,” he says, still laughing and Sansa is still wishing her son would cry. “What else do you expect when you marry a Stark?”

Queen Cersei spares only a glance for Torrhen. She smiles at him and wishes him health. Compliments his dark black hair. Joffrey gives the baby no time (and Sansa, under her breath, thanks the Gods for it). Tommen, barely no longer a babe himself, is simply glad to have someone younger than himself in the Red Keep for a little while.

Catelyn and Eddard Stark do, in fact, send their eldest son Robb to the Royal Wedding.

Most Great Houses are sending their eldest sons; many of whom come with their new wives. It’s a true parade of new Lords; fathers fall everyday and leaves spaces for their sons to fill.

The only exception is Lord Walder Frey, who comes himself with a new wife who has barely left childhood.

Robb arrives with his new wife following behind him. Wifehood has seemingly turned Myrcella Baratheon from girl to woman. She wears her hair the way that Sansa recognizes her own handmaids had done her hair, before, and her deep red and glittering gold gowns have been replaced with the greys and dark blue colours of the North. She is sweet girl and seemingly enamoured with her husband, following him around with a hand hooked into the crook of his elbow.

Robb, for his part, seems very happy.

“Where is he?” Is the first question he asks Sansa.

Sansa hands Torrhen over to her brother without hesitation and nearly cries watching Robb cradle her son. Her whole heart held, there, in the arms of her brother. In the arms of a man she knows is safe, a man she knows would protect her son if it was needed of him, a man she knew already loved Torrhen so much without ever even having known him before today. Sansa nearly cries because it’s as if her past and present have melted together to create something new; a future.

And then Robb says, “I’ll have one of my own of these soon,” and Sansa does cry.

**XIX.**

Myrcella births her husband twins when Torrhen is halfway to his second name day.  
They are a boy, born first, and a girl, born second; the reverse of Myrcella’s own mother and uncle. The letter from Catelyn Stark tells Sansa they have her brothers auburn curls and Myrcella’s pretty green eyes and they were named for Northerners, Artos and Alysanne.

It’s odd, her mother writes, to have a tiny baby she did not birth amongst these walls in Winterfell. Odd, but good. She wishes for a million more of them, she says.

The second son comes before Torrhen’s third name day.

“Your father will consider it a personal insult if we do not give this child a Baratheon name,” Sansa says to Gendry while she still carries him.

The smile Stannis gives them is a small, though a smile all the same, when they tell him the boys name will be Steffon.

Steffon looks more Sansa’s child then Torrhen did. Where Torrhen was a Stark family name and Baratheon features, all hard and thick, Steffon is the opposite. A Baratheon family name for his Stark features, a wolf dressed in in stag’s clothes. His hair is a shade of dark rust and his eyes are stormy grey. He reminds Sansa of Robb.

But still — there are features in Steffon’s face that are Baratheon through and through. He is still Gendry’s son.

Steffon is born smaller than Torrhen. And Steffon cries. Often. Screams and wails seems to be all his does for the first months of his life. Maester Cressen jokes that the Seven favoured them with their first child, and now they were paying for it with the second.

If only to make their lives more difficult, Torrhen has decided he hates having a younger brother.

There are moments where a wailing Steffon will finally fall silent, rocked in his father’s arms, finally sated for a moment or perhaps just exhausted, and Torrhen will pinch at his baby brothers fleshy forearms or thighs and start up another round of endless cries. It does not matter how many times Sansa slaps his hand away and chastises him, or Gendry takes Torrhen to his room to sit alone on his bed until they’ve decided he’s been punished enough.

Torrhen is miserable about having a brother and so he has decided to make everyone else around him miserable as well.

As Steffon grows, he grows sick.

Maester Cressen tells Gendry and Sansa he was an awful baby because he was a sick baby. He is small, thin and frail, and sleeps much more than Torrhen ever had, even past his first and second name day.

There is a moment of panic, when Steffon runs a fever so hot it’s seemingly burning him from within, and it does not break for days and days. Sansa sits at his bedside and cries while Steffon sleeps, then cries more when she hears Gendry lead Torrhen away from standing outside his brother’s bedroom door, and Torrhen asks what’s wrong with Steffon, and when Sansa will spend time with him again.

Steffon pulls through, thank god. Sansa never leaves his bedside and prays to the Seven and the Old Gods and, finally, the fever breaks. When the Maester’s are sure Steffon will recover, Sansa and Gendry let Torrhen see him.

The first thing Torrhen does is climb into bed next to his brother, who he had given scrapes and bumps and bruises for years past, wrap him in his tiny arms, and kiss his forehead.

Sansa presses her fingers to her lips to keep herself from sobbing, overwhelmed. Nothing will have been worth the pain of Steffon’s sickness. But Gendry circles his arm around her waist and places a kiss below her ear, and Sansa watches her son, quiet in such an obvious display of love and affection —and it may be the best outcome she could have wished for.

**XX.**

Their third child is a girl. Sansa knows her for only three days before the sickness takes her. Sansa finds herself wishing she had more time with her daughter, while also wishing the day had come quicker, should it need to come at all.

They had plans to name her Syrena. She had been so, so small when she slipped away from Sansa. And in a world that held Sansa betwixt it’s teeth for years, it had never been more cruel then when it stole her daughter.

Sansa does not sleep that night. She spends it crying into Gendry’s chest, body so wrecked with sobs that she aches in the morning, from the inside of herself and all the way outwards.

Sansa’s second daughter, Cassanna, is pulled from her already dead. Sansa is not if this had been crueller or less so. She laments that she has the two sadnesses to compare.

Sansa thinks of when Lady Selyse had told her, eyes sad, that she was made for having babies. And then Sansa had a sickly son, and lost two daughters, and now she’s wondering how she ruined all of that. She lays in bed next to Gendry, their backs to one another. The candlelight is dim and Sansa feels hollow.

“What will we do if I can’t have more children?” She means to say it to Gendry but her heart stutters at the thought, and so she says it mostly into the half-darkness of their bedchamber instead.

There is the sound of the sheets rustling. Gendry’s hand comes to rest on Sansa’s elbow and he calls her name, soft and gentle, and Sansa waits in silence for the darkness to answer.

“We have two sons already,” Gendry continues. “We have Torrhen and Steffon and they are good, happy children. You are a good mother. We do not need more children.”

“But you will be upset if we cannot have more,” Sansa murmurs. She cannot look at her husband. She can barely stand his palm against her bare skin.

_It’s not fair. I waited so long for them. I waited so long to have my babies. And now, so fast, the Gods are not letting me have any more._

“The only thing that will upset me is that it upsets you,” Gendry replies. He presses lips to Sansa’s shoulder and she sighs.

“Why am I not a prince?” Torrhen asks Sansa one more as they break their fast. The question takes her off guard; she wonders who has been discussing royalty, and the lineage thereof, in front of her son, who is only six years.

“Because, sweetling,” Sansa smiles at him. Beside her, Steffon tugs at her sleeve for more bacon and Sansa points to the bread still left on his plate. For such a loud baby, he has grown into a quiet toddler. “Your father is not the King. Princes are the sons of Kings,” Sansa pushes Torrhen’s unruly bangs lovingly out of his eyes, “but don’t worry, all sons are princes in their mother’s eyes.”

“But Father could be King,” Torrhen replies.

Sansas brow furrows. She can’t understand where these ideas in her sons head are coming from. “Well, yes, but,” she wants to put it delicately: Torrhen is six and he is smart for his age but he is still Sansa’s child, still a baby to her in many ways, and she has no desire to explain the horrors of the world to him yet. “But many awful things would need to happen for your Father to become King.”

“But he could be,” Torrhen insists. And in this way, with his stubborn bull head, he is exactly like his father. “And if he King, that would make me a Prince, wouldn’t it.”

“Yes,” Sansa relents, mouth pressed into a tight line. “I suppose it would.”

“Your son asked me — no, today, your son told me he was to be a prince one day,” Sansa tells Gendry that night, after her children are safe and asleep in their rooms. She has taken to checking on them often, as if they may disappear as her daughters did.

Sansa does not sleep much anymore.

Gendry hums. It’s the noise he makes when he wants Sansa to think he is only half-listening but has heard everything just fine.

“Any idea who’s putting these kinds of ideas in his head?” Sansa presses.

“How am I to know?” Gendry snaps, overly defensive for what should be a simple, innocent question. “His wet nurse fills his head with a million stories every day.”

Sansa is not satisfied. But she lets the subject lie.

The truth has a habit of finding her.

**XXI.**

Torrhen and Steffon are eight and five when Lyarra is born. Robb and Myrcella have welcomed a second child, a boy named Rickard, and Arya writes from Dorne, sometimes, about her new husband Trystane Martell, and how often he indulges her less than ladylike sensibilities.

And Sansa — Sansa finally, finally, gets to keep her daughter.

Lyarra is pink from her nose to her toes and very, very small. Smaller even then Steffon, and it worries Sansa, but she is so beautiful and the Maester’s tell Sansa she is healthy. And that’s all she could wish for.

“I thought we’d have another boy,” Sansa confesses. She does not explain her fear to Gendry. That she feared she may never be able to have a single daughter that wasn’t stolen from her.

Lyarra is so warm in Sansa’s arms. Sansa never wants to let her go. There is a comfort in the warmth of your newborn that Sansa can’t explain, a feeling that she would never be able to replicate.

“She looks like a Tully,” Gendry murmurs against Sansa’s temple. It’s true. If Torrhen is Baratheon and Steffon is Stark, Lyarra is all leaping trout. She reminds Sansa of herself, and then she reminds Sansa of her mother.

Torrhen is largely disinterested in his sister. Not in a angry way. Sansa understands it. He has already had a baby come into the world after him and considers himself a big, old boy now. She had felt the same way when Bran followed Arya — the magic was lost. Steffon, however, is enamoured with Lyarra from the moment he meets her.

**XXII.**

The raven arrives from Winterfell four months after Lyarra is born. Sansa is still learning to wake and not be terrified her daughter will be gone.

 _Sansa_ , it reads, in her mother’s handwriting, _I have heard you have had a daughter. I am so happy for you. I know you must have wished for hard for a girl after the Gods gave you two boys. And now you have her. You will be such a good mother to a daughter. I’m sure you’ll braid her hair and teach her stitching and how to be a good lady just as you were._

_Or, god forbid, she takes after your sister. And then you will understand the headache that was raising your sister._

_It does not matter. She will be a good wife and an example for her family just as the two of you both became for our family. I love your daughter so much without even having met her._

_Your sister is expecting her first with the Martell boy, have you heard? The Maester’s in Dorne tell her she will have a boy, she tells me they’ll be naming him Doryan. She is very happy in the South, Sansa, or at least she tells me so in her letters. And now, after the news of you and Arya, your good-sister will not stop bothering your brother to have more children._

_They day we left you in Dragonstone, Sansa, this was all I could have hoped for you. A good husband and a family of your own. You used to tell me about all the little ones you would have with your future husband when you were a girl and to see you have them lifts a weight off my heart like I cannot explain._

_Your father has been offered the position of Hand of the King,_ Sansa’s mother finishes the letter with, _and he has accepted. He is giving Robb his seat at Winterfell and we will travel South with Rickon soon. I think we will visit before we go to King’s Landing. I would very much like to meet my grandchildren._

_I love you dearly,  
Mother._

_**fin.** _

**Author's Note:**

> i hope i got across that the events of game of thrones still happen in this universe; i effectively pushed them back about ten years but all that shit still hits the fan. i kind of wanted to sow the seeds of it without coming with it outright because a) it's a secret gendry is keeping from sansa and this fic is from sansa's pov and b) because i did not want to have to try and descrunt and write the whole clusterfuck that would be the actual game of thrones plot after effectively cutting it into a hundred pieces and flushing it down the toilet lmao.
> 
> i do, however, have many a thoughts about this verse. so if you wanna maybe ask me some things or just talk about it in general, i'm trying to use my [fic tumblr](https://jaekyus.tumblr.com/) more for that kind of stuff. (you can also leave me prompts there if you want) (i would love to write more sansa/gendry) (i'm just saying)


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